GREAT TUMULT IN THE CONGRESS: On the Ruinous State of the Federal Purse

Great Tumult in the Congress: On the Ruinous State of the Federal Purse

THE BROADSHEET — By Our Correspondent in the Capital. Ye Federal Purse Lays in Grievous Ruin as Our Representatives Doth Spend Without Restraint. It is with heavy heart and heavier ledger that this Broadsheet must report to the citizens of this republic upon the calamitous condition of the national treasury, which doth bleed coin at a rate that would cause any honest merchant to take to his bed in anguish.

The great and solemn question before the Congress of these United States is not whether money shall be spent — for spent it shall be, and in quantities that would make a Croesus weep — but rather upon what it shall be spent, by whose authority, and whether any accounting shall ever be rendered to those whose labor provides it. The answer to that last inquiry, your correspondent regrets to inform you, appears to be: not soon.

On the Nature of the Present Disorder

A nation that spends perpetually beyond its means is a nation that borrows against its children's future. The founders understood this with a clarity that seems to have departed from our present legislators along with their powdered wigs. Alexander Hamilton, though he favored a national debt as a means of binding the states to the federal enterprise, never imagined it as a permanent condition to be expanded without limit or accountability. He imagined a debt that would be serviced, reduced, and eventually retired — a tool of national construction, not a crutch of permanent dependence.

What we have constructed instead is a system in which both great parties of the republic compete not in the virtue of fiscal restraint but in the creativity of their spending proposals. One party would spend upon the domestic arrangements of the citizen; the other upon the military arrangements of the empire; and neither, it appears, would spend upon the reduction of the debt that makes all other spending possible only by the continued grace of those nations willing to lend to us.

What the Pamphleteers Knew

The pamphleteers of the revolutionary era understood something that our modern legislators appear to have forgotten: that power exercised without accountability is tyranny in slow motion. When the Continental Congress could not pay its debts, it lost the confidence of the soldiers who had fought for it, the merchants who had supplied it, and the foreign powers whose assistance it required. Fiscal irresponsibility is not merely an economic problem. It is a political and moral problem — a failure of the duty that those who hold power owe to those who granted it.

The citizen who works and pays his taxes has a right to know where that money goes. The merchant who extends credit to the republic has a right to know whether it will be repaid. The soldier who defends the nation has a right to know whether the nation is worth defending — whether its promises have any substance behind them or are merely the words of men who will not be present to answer for their consequences.

The Accounting That Is Owed

This Broadsheet does not pretend to offer a simple remedy for the accumulated follies of decades. Debts of this magnitude are not retired in a single session of Congress or by the stroke of any president's pen. What we insist upon, however, is the accounting. The citizen deserves to know the true state of the federal finances — not the laundered version presented in political speeches, but the full reckoning: what is owed, to whom, at what interest, and upon what timeline it must be addressed.

The founders gave us a republic. They gave us a system of representative government whose legitimacy rests upon the consent of the governed and the accountability of the governing. A government that spends without limit, borrows without consequence, and renders no honest accounting to its citizens has broken faith with that founding compact in one of its most essential dimensions.

The purse is grievously depleted. The question is whether the citizens of this republic have the will to demand an honest reckoning — and whether the men and women they send to Congress have the courage to provide one. History, it must be said, does not provide grounds for great optimism on either count. But the republic endures, and the asking of the question is itself an act of civic virtue that Washington, Jefferson, and Madison would have recognized and approved.

— The Broadsheet, Your Faithful Correspondent in the Federal City